Frank Herbert The Maker of Dune by Frank Herbert Timothy Oreilly

Author:Frank Herbert, Timothy Oreilly [Frank Herbert, Timothy Oreilly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, biography
Published: 2011-10-09T04:47:22+00:00

Chapter 6: An Ecology of Consciousness

The tensions between security and adaptability, between social order and social experiment, are encapsulated in the idea of utopia. In a utopia, social structure takes the place of the messiah or the mechanical God as a means of protecting man from the unpleasant facts of the real universe. Adaptability is not needed, because every conceivable problem has been taken care of. In most imaginary utopias rigid social control is a necessity, because men have a distressing tendency, when left to themselves, to fall away from the “perfect” norm. Herbert observes that utopian writers “turn to more and more planning, a pervasive planning-octopus which reaches deeper and deeper into the individual life.”

The Eyes of Heisenberg (1966) is a dystopian novel along the classic lines of 1984 and Brave New World. It describes a far future of Earth in which genetic engineering has produced the perfect human being, the Optiman. Only a select few embryos have “that beautiful perfection of form and mind that could accept the indefinite balancing of life through the delicately adjusted enzyme prescriptions.” The story begins when Harvey and Lizbeth Durant ask to watch the genetic surgery on their embryo. Immediately, a whole world comes into focus for the reader, a world of rigid social distinctions. Almost like an insect society, the teeming horde of “sterries” does all the work, allowed to breed only occasionally by their leaders, the caste of Optimen (themselves sterile, though immortal), who maintain their rule by tailoring the genes of their swarming servants. It is a benevolent aristocracy. “They are the power that loves and cares for us,” the slogan says. But not all the Folk are happy. As translated cynically by one character, the slogan instead reads, “They had the world firmly in their grip, the future planned— a place for every man and every man in his place.” Control of the populace is effected by propaganda and the myth of Optiman superiority, as well as by the promise of progeny, or longer life, to the elect. But most important of all is gene-tailoring for an obedient strain of Folk, and the hormone addiction that affects both the Folk and the Optimen.

Everything is not as it seems. The perfect Optimen are hidden away in a closely guarded citadel, as if afraid of the world they so casually rule. And the apparently ignorant parents, the Durants, are part of a conspiracy. A renegade surgeon conceals the fact that he has engineered an Optiman fetus with the unheard-of capability to reproduce itself. The child is stolen from the vats and implanted in Lizbeth Durant. The Parents’ Underground dreams of freeing reproduction from Optiman control.

There follows a swift cloak-and-dagger plot as the Optimen discover the falsified medical records and pursue the members of the Parents’ Underground who have stolen the perfect child. The escape of the Underground with the infant is also the occasion for a long-awaited Cyborg revolt. The Cyborgs—the result of an earlier attempt to improve on the

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